The gentry have landed
Hipsters, progressives, and the battle for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) has long been known as the poorest off-reserve urban neighbourhood in the country. That may still be the case, but the invading forces of gentrification are relentlessly occupying it, with ominous consequences for the predominantly low-income residents.
The speedball of gentrification was Woodward’s. This massive historic department store was a site of contestation since it closed its doors in 1993. The community fought against various plans for upscale development to preserve it as a space for low-income residents, with social housing, affordable food, accessible services, and other amenities. This struggle culminated in Woodsquat, the occupation and tent city that lasted three months in the fall of 2002. Eventually, the City of Vancouver collaborated with developers, retail businesses, an educational institution, and non-profit housing providers to produce a model of “social mix” that would showcase its vision for the area and set the course for future development.
In the run-up to the 2010 Olympic Games, Woodward’s unleashed 536 condo units into the DTES, along with large retail outlets and other businesses, and a satellite university campus (Simon Fraser University’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts). Since then, a number of new condo projects have emerged within blocks of Woodward’s, and over 1,000 market units have been built or are scheduled for construction throughout the DTES. In the shadow of Woodward’s two towers, housing once available to low-income residents has been transformed into condos and high-priced micro-lofts or lost through rent increases.
A desk clerk at the Metropole Hotel across the street from Woodward’s succinctly expressed the impact of it when he told a researcher from the Carnegie Community Action Project, “We’re trying to get rid of the welfare people.” As the activists fighting to save Woodward’s for the community knew all along, as Woodward’s goes, so goes the neighbourhood. The floodgates of gentrification have been blown wide open by the Woodward’s “experiment” in social mix and revitalization.
In addition to market housing, dozens of new retail businesses now occupy the storefronts along the main arteries of the DTES, offering consumers an array of fine dining experiences, pricey microbrewery beer, expensive furniture, fake suntans, new fashion, and $3 doughnuts. This material transformation of the streetscape is accompanied by a noticeable cultural shift as well. As increasing numbers of wealthy urbanites come into the area to shop or dine, the “frontier” of the DTES becomes a more comfortable and familiar space, and the newcomers’ privilege and entitlement quickly dominate the social terrain. The growing presence of hipsters in the DTES changes what was once known as skid row into the “new community of cool,” with the accompanying disregard or disdain for local residents unable to assimilate to the emerging ethos.
In the game of urban transformation, political decision-makers at city hall are key players. With their scripted policy of social mix chiselled in stone, they manipulate the levers of change by deploying various mechanisms of zoning, permits, and licensing to promote upscale development on the ground.
Vision Vancouver, despite its brand image as a progressive municipal party, has up-zoned Chinatown to pave the way for a flood of condo towers and has approved a massive project of 282 market housing units and 70,000 square feet of retail and light industrial space on the eastern edge of the DTES (dubbed “Woodward’s East” by local residents), all in the face of significant opposition by the low-income community. Not surprisingly, this is the project of Vancouver developer Wall Financial, which has close ties to Vision Vancouver and has contributed, through its subsidiaries, over $200,000 to the party’s coffers.
Although Vision Vancouver has implemented a Local Area Planning Process (LAPP) and engaged some low-income residents within that strategy of community consultation, they have, in the midst of the process, given the green light to hundreds of condo units and numerous businesses, including “Woodward’s East.” Herb Varley, a young Indigenous resident and activist in the DTES and co-chair of the LAPP committee, poignantly expressed his own frustration with the process: “After two years of working with the City I wonder what we have been included in. It feels like the only questions we get to answer are about how we would like to die, slow or fast, not whether we want to live.” As the LAPP winds down and the city prepares its final report, the low-income members of the committee have issued a call for a social justice zone in the DTES that would prioritize the needs of low-income residents for housing, adequate income, non-discriminatory services, and improved safety.
The city’s policy of rampant gentrification and the discursive logic that accompanies it are amplified and disseminated by the mainstream media. Last February the sustained anti-gentrification protests outside the posh PiDGiN restaurant provoked a spate of media coverage, the vast majority of which voiced full support for the restaurant owner and disdain for those who opposed efforts to “clean up” the neighbourhood. Historically, the mainstream media have played an important role in popularizing the dominant poor-bashing, stigmatizing perspectives of the neighbourhood while applauding the courage of “socially conscious” entrepreneurs and consumers in bringing positive change to the “blight” of the DTES.
As real estate developers, retail business owners, municipal politicians, city planners, and media pundits promote the gentrification agenda and shape public policy and perception accordingly, police and private security ensure that those whose lives are most disrupted and harmed by these massive changes do not disturb the new inhabitants and their economic and social investments. The DTES is the only district in the city with its own specialized (and filmed-for-reality-TV) Beat Enforcement Team; here, police presence is relentless, and surveillance, harassment, and ticketing are epidemic.
The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users has frequently voiced concern about the ways the area is being “mined for crime,” and recent data has revealed that in the past four years, 95 per cent of the city’s bylaw tickets for street disorder violations – including jaywalking, vending, spitting, and urinating in public – have been issued in the DTES. In addition, business improvement associations hire private security companies to harass panhandlers and sex workers in order to maintain an atmosphere that ensures comfort for condo owners, business operators, and their patrons.
Of course the fallout of gentrification on low-income DTES residents is devastating. Upscale real estate development drives up property values and produces a domino effect of increasing rents and renovictions. The end result is involuntary displacement and homelessness. For those who struggle to pay escalating rents, financial strains translate into mental and physical stress, and personal health deteriorates. The rapid emergence of retail businesses proliferates zones of exclusion that are inaccessible and unwelcoming to residents on limited income and exacerbates the experience of alienation and dislocation within one’s own neighbourhood. Necessary strategies of survival entangle low-income people in the criminal justice system, or they are coerced into carefully managed regimes of medical and therapeutic support that operate as systems of social control.
As gentrification transforms physical space and social relations to further elite interests, life-giving networks of care and support that low-income residents have developed and relied upon for years are threatened or disrupted, and displacement from the neighbourhood produces greater isolation and impending violence. A community that has been characterized by remarkable acceptance morphs into a place where non-conformity to the status quo is made more visible and deviance elicits increased efforts at management or removal. Demarcations between “good” and “bad” poor are heightened and manipulated by organizations, service providers, and dominant media to serve their own ends.
All of these pressures of transformation produce increasing conflict at many levels: between the new condo owners and wealthier consumers and the low-income residents, between those who can navigate the social changes well and those who feel alienated and desperate because of them, between those engaged in daily survival and the managers and enforcers of civil order.
Fundamentally, gentrification in the DTES replicates the dynamics of colonization. It’s a strategy of accumulation by dispossession that is rationalized by paternalistic notions of benevolence (“we’re improving the neighbourhood”), normalized by hegemonic, state-supported market logic (“it’s the natural evolution of progress and healthy change”), and reinforced through ideologies of gender, race, and class hierarchies (“we [mostly white wealthy men] know best”). Like colonization, gentrification is a process of immense violence inflicted on the bodies, minds, and spirits of those who are deemed in the way of political and economic power.
But the DTES low-income community is remarkably resilient and strong. It is rooted in a history of collective struggles for social justice. It’s a community that has engaged in confrontation, agitation, and determined resistance against the forces that have threatened its vitality. It knows that capitulating to the gentrification agenda will only result in more humiliating charity, more bureaucratic regulations, more social control, more displacement, and more homelessness, and it says, no!
This spirit of resistance is also accompanied by clarity of vision. The refusal to be dominated by elite political and economic interests is fuelled by a vision for the neighbourhood grounded in the lived experience and collective wisdom of the low-income community. It is a vision of social justice, mutual care, and human dignity; it’s an inextinguishable affirmation of life and freedom. The DTES is the heart of the city, and it will continue to beat strong despite the pressures of gentrification brought against it.
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9 Comments
Never give up…..‘Freedom of choice’
From Frank Delorme in Vancover-Mt.Pleasant on Aug 19th, 2013 at 1:07pm
Thank you Dave Diewert. An informative read, written with great clarity and words that exude power. Well done, very well done…
From Sid Tan in Canada on Aug 19th, 2013 at 1:17pm
What Mr Diewert omits to tell us is as significant as what he does. His are strange omissions.
He neglected to tell readers that the Woodward’s project also includes 175 units of single person non-market housing, and 75 family non-market housing units, both operated by non-profits. They have bettered the lives of hundreds of the poor.
He neglected to mention that the pimps and drug dealers have been driven away from the area restored by Woodward’s. It is now safe for women to walk at night. Army & Navy no longer boards up its windows at night. There is no “social dignity” to be found in the company of pimps and drug dealers.
Diewert offers stale ideology instead of practical solutions. Picketing restaurants is a foolish substitute for actually rolling up sleeves and building co-op housing for the poor. (Even the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council withdrew its support for the picket.) Many have done it before. We have over 5000 units of social housing in the DTES, and many were built as co-ops by those who live in them. Why don’t Diewert and his friends get to work and actually build housing?
He fails to tell the whole story. “Homeless Dave” is not homeless at all. He actually lives in North Vancouver, and commutes daily for his protests. In fact, many of the protestors live nowhere near the neighbourhood they are trying to preserve.
Mr Diewert failed to mention a notorious scandal. When opposing one particular development, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) let slip their real reason. They oppose it, they said, because “it will destabilize the drug market”. It was a terrible PR blunder, but candid as hell.
What VANDU admitted is their real agenda, and that of Mr Diewert and his dwindling band: they support the status quo, and want nothing to interrupt it.
The status quo is completely unacceptable to the majority of our people, and that’s why change has come to the DTES. For the sake of the victims of pimps and drug dealers, it’s long overdue.
From Tom Servua in Vancouver B.C. on Aug 19th, 2013 at 1:57pm
Overall this is a great article with very compelling points. However, there are some issues:
- It is, at times, somewhat conspiratorial and dismissive of so-called “hipsters”; – Uses too much academic jargon to be broadly accessible and marketable; and – Too conveniently overlooks the problematic behaviour within the DTES caused by its “original” residents to be taken seriously.
I make these points only because the positive impact this article can have is somewhat obscured by the issues above, and I would like to see it reach a wider audience without unintentionally (or otherwise) excluding or offending possible readers.
From Ryan in Toronto on Aug 19th, 2013 at 5:43pm
Gentrification, and the segregation of rich and poor is bad—yes. But mixing is not.
I don’t see any value in preserving a culture where it is assumed that one can only walk through East Hastings if they are poor—or because they are looking to buy drugs. The social mix is forcing perspective, healthy perspective, on everybody. It forces perspective on those consumed in an unhealthy subculture of drug abuse, egged on because they are surrounded by others willing to engage in the lifestyle. It forces perspective on the “gentry”, by forcing them to witness the social situation of those around them. Together they improve each others perspectives, forcing them to consider what they would rather ignore.
Countless studies show that projects like Regent Park or others with 100% social housing result in decreased outcomes for everybody involved. The positive feedback loop of drug abuse runs on overdrive, making it far worse than it would had there been social mix.
So I welcome the gentry. There is nothing about the old arrangement that is admirable or worth defending.
Sincerely,
- An Actual DTES Resident living next door to Insite (which is a good program, btw).
From Kelsey in Ground Zero of DTES Drug Problem on Aug 20th, 2013 at 1:40am
Thank you for your article it is beautifully expressed. I have shared it widely. I am an activist, picketer, person, mother, grandmother, worker and so much more.
“This spirit of resistance is also accompanied by clarity of vision. The refusal to be dominated by elite political and economic interests is fuelled by a vision for the neighbourhood grounded in the lived experience and collective wisdom of the low-income community. It is a vision of social justice, mutual care, and human dignity; it’s an inextinguishable affirmation of life and freedom. The DTES is the heart of the city, and it will continue to beat strong despite the pressures of gentrification brought against it.”
We need balance in reporting on this tragic issue and you are one of the few providing it.
From Page Turner in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver on Aug 20th, 2013 at 9:57am
Let’s get serious here – the areas being gentrified are not some kind of enclave for the working poor. The vast majority of people in this neighborhood are in SROs and inadequate housing not because they’re simply ‘poor’ in the sense that they’re victims of the economy and circumstances; the majority are here because they are severely addicted to drugs and/or have serious mental illness. The argument that massive social housing needs to be developed in this area for the ‘poor’ is akin to arguing that Vancouver needs to build a massive infrastructure to support rampant drug abuse and hospital closures. Building social housing for people addicted to drugs is about as useless a means to attack the drug trade as throwing them all in jail.
And this mentality that it’s somehow society’s responsibility to maintain vibrant slums and refuse gentrification is ridiculous, and this is what’s turning people off about this issue. The idea that the opening of a nice restaurant is an act of violence on the poor that deserves protest is absurd, and generates absolutely zero support from the general public on this cause.
From Phillip Grey in Vancouver, B.C. on Aug 20th, 2013 at 11:58am
Homeless Dave is not Homeless. The anti-gentrification crowd have no (zero, zip, nada) support from regular folk in Vancouver. They lost.
From Murray Dawbin in Vancouver on Aug 21st, 2013 at 8:40am
Dave, I completely agree with you. DTES is the jewel of Vancouver and should remain in its unique economic condition. The East Side serves as a example that many prosperous areas of Vancouver can look to for the inspiration needed to flourish and develop. If the East Side becomes a hotspot for new businesses and condo development projects, employment rates could skyrocket uncontrollably, and the economic stratification between DTES and the rest of Vancouver would be lost.
As a member of a democratic society, I am a firm believer that every Vancouverite, regardless of social ranking or income, should be allowed to urinate and spit in public, or step off the curb in front of an oncoming bus, without receiving a small fine. If these activities should cease or decrease from police intervention, the reputation and image that the people of DTES have worked so hard and long to create could be lost.
From Jeremy in Vancouver on Sep 18th, 2013 at 11:14am